Western Isles Holiday – South Uist and Eriskay – part 1

The Western Isles or Outer Hebrides is a chain of 6 main islands (Lewis, Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra) plus some smaller isles. These sit off the North West Coast of Scotland. Gaelic is the first language on these islands but signs are all in Gaelic then English.

I found a map on Google that seems to no longer link to its original source so I’m unable to check if it’s copyrighted, but I will share here and remove if it needs to be. It does seem a good one to show you these islands I’m talking about and their location off the mainland. The larger island on the right that isn’t labelled is Skye (one of the the Inner Hebrides).

Last year we visited the Isles of Lewis, Harris and Great Bernera and I wrote a collection of posts.

This March we visited these isles:

• Berneray (off North Uist)
• North Uist
• Benbecula
• Grimsay (off Benbecula)
• South Uist
• Eriskay (off South Uist)
• Barra*
• Vatersay* (off Barra).

*In 2017 we visited all except these islands, but I didn’t post about it then.

This is the first post about our week.

In 2017 we had based ourselves on North Uist, this time we stayed on South Uist as it would be handy for us exploring more of that area and would be easy to catch a ferry to Barra for the day.

We stayed in a similar style cottage, Smiddy Cottage, which is based on the traditional housing on these isles. Many on the island are now derelict but some are being done up and converted to holiday rentals.

The location of the cottage is pretty much at the southern tip, so we had dual aspect views of the sea and a short walk to the nearest beach. In the distance we could see Eriskay and Barra.

On the Sunday we drove across the causeway to Eriskay and drove up and down each of the roads. It was very windy but a beautiful sunny day. Wild small ponies live on Eriskay (and some of the other isles). Its also famous for the location of the Whisky Galore! true story. More on that in a later post.

On Monday we set off in the car to explore some of the sites available on the Uist Unearthed app. An app that tells you the history of some ancient sites and has some augmented reality you can view on your phone….IF you can find the right spot where the icon is to scan. My goodness we wasted a lot of time in the car and on foot trying to find the location of where to scan and it was blowing a hoolie! It even snowed a little and hailed. The idea of the app in principle is great…just in practice is a challenge.

After much searching on the sand dunes we did manage to find the location to scan to see and read about Cladh Hallan, “the site of an impressive Bronze Age settlement in which the first known prehistoric mummies in Britain were found.” With the app you can see how it may have looked 3,000 years ago! It worked properly when I wasn’t stood in the way but that photo makes me laugh so I’m showing that instead.

We were not as successful in our search for Cill Donnain or Bornais. Maybe the signs had been taken down for winter…or blown away. It’s a shame as we are very interested in Vikings. If you can’t find the sign to scan then you unfortunately can’t enjoy the augmented reality but there is still some information on the sites on the app you can read.

We drove the lumpy bumpy track out to Dun Vulan, the remains of an Iron Age drystone broch, which is in between the other two sites, there’s no AR for that one and my goodness it was a windy and cold spot.

On our way back we had a walk on a beach around the corner from our nearest beach, more on the west rather than south facing. 19 years ago I’d collected lots of shells from these isles, I returned those shells to this beach.

I shall leave it there and continue tomorrow in a new post.